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Posts Tagged ‘appalachia’

 

 

 

Sometimes when I feel my heart

harden, become quartzite, a stone

hard enough to cut my tooth, hard

enough to cut the blade of a knife,

I let myself be led

into the narrow and moss-soft gorges

of the Appalachians.

The creek here has rendered the sandstone

edges into rounded walls

where hemlock and dark green lichen grow.

 

It’s no revelation that this church

of curves is the work of water.

Still, when my friend Paul mentions

that only because the water is moving

is it able to erode the stone, the knowledge

washes me new. How long have I been settled

in a quiet pool?

 

I have tried not to move, tried not

to be tumbled. For a moment,

I envy the rounded bit of quartzite

Paul holds in his palm.

 

No, I tell myself. That would only change

the surface of things. What is smoothed

is no less hard. I turn to the ferns

growing out of the rock. Time

for a new metaphor.

 

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